What kind of future London do we see? Francis Beckett, a political journalist and periodic playwright, has devised one in which policing is privatised, hospitals are reserved for rich foreigners and the streets are filled with predatory beggars. As a dystopian satire in the tradition of 1984 or A Clockwork Orange, his play has a graphic vividness and falls down only when it seeks to become a redemptive love story.

The virtue of Beckett's nightmare vision lies in its Orwellian detail and suggestion that the future contains echoes of the present. As a party of American visitors is decanted from the tourist lounge at Waterloo station to the safe precincts of the Savoy hotel, a young doctor breaks away from the group to experience for himself the real London. Everywhere he goes he encounters bribery, corruption, physical intimidation and scavengers who, on closer inspection, turn out to be jobless doctors and discarded philosophy dons. The idea of a metropolis in which mass poverty and unemployment breed a hunger for popular revolution is anything but implausible. What I couldn't buy was the notion that a renegade visitor would meet a surgeon on the streets and, on the slightest acquaintance, fall in love with her and offer to whisk her back to America.

But whatever its dramatic shortcomings, Beckett's play provokes us into re-examining the present. A generation ago, as Peter Wilby points out in the current issue of the New Statesman, we would have scoffed at the idea that the competitive market could be introduced into policing: now it is starting to happen. And, as homeless figures once more threaten to become a feature of the London streets, Beckett's vision of highly educated hustlers begging for the price of a meal no longer seems far-fetched.

Played in a room over a pub in Camden high street, Beckett's play also gains a bruising intimacy in Christine Kimberley's production and Mike Duran as the defecting tourist, Suzanne Kendall as his desired doctor and Ned Monaghan as his manipulative superior all give a good account of themselves. It took the generosity of one of those traffic-light touts to give my car-windscreen a free wash, as I drove home without an ounce of change, to restore my somewhat shaken faith in London's future.